David S. Brown's excellent biography presents F. Scott Fitzgerald as more than an accurate chronicler of his own times: a world full of clocks and calendars that characterize his writings. For Brown, Fitzgerald was also an interpreter of those times, armed like many cultural and intellectual historians with a distinct point of view. As he observes in his introduction, “the shiny surfaces of [Fitzgerald's] writings—the pitch-perfect cadences, the knowing eye for contemporary color, and the discerning ear for ‘current’ dialogue—are put in the service of a deeper and seemingly timeless historical vision. Fitzgerald's penetrating descriptions of the Western world's leap from feudalism to capitalism, from faith to secularism, and from the tradition oriented to the flux oriented make him one of the more important cultural commentators America has produced” (5).
Fitzgerald's great subject was loss: loss of the illusions that made life resonate, loss of the golden girl, loss of...
